The New Yorker Casts Its Ballot

IN A 1925 prospectus for the New Yorker, legendary founding editor Harold Ross famously declared that his new magazine was “not for the old lady from Dubuque.” Eighty-eight years later, a publication that once prided itself on being the best, brightest and most sophisticated magazine in America has become something of a provincial old lady itself. Granted, the provincialism is of an inverted sort, centered as it is on the island of Manhattan, but provincial it is nonetheless. This inverted provincialism was perfectly—if inadvertently—summed up in a cartoon by P. C. Vey that appeared in last year’s July 30New Yorker, just as the 2012 presidential campaign was heating up.